Quiz: Can You Guess Which of These Future Stars Appeared on ‘Are You Afraid of the Dark?’

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If you were a Nickelodeon kid growing up in the 1990s, your gateway to horror was Are You Afraid of the Dark? The anthology show, which featured spooky tales told in classic campfire style by the members of the Midnight Society, ran for seven seasons and induced chills without the gore.

It also served a who’s who of up-and-coming talent. See if you can identify which familiar faces appeared on the show and which didn’t in the quiz below.


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Are You Afraid of the Dark? was part of a larger juvenile horror market explosion in the ’90s. Kids at school book fairs gobbled up R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series and the works of Christopher Pike, both of which were often more gruesome than anything that could be shown on television. (A Goosebumps television series, minus the more disturbing elements of the books, premiered in 1995.)

Nickelodeon, however, almost missed out on the kid-horror boom. The network originally turned down the pitch for Are You Afraid of the Dark?, with executives insisting that frightening children wasn’t part of their strategy. (They eventually came around.) But the network drew the line when it came to one thing: The campfire during the wraparound segments. The channel insisted that the characters never be shown lighting it because they didn’t want to educate kids at home on how to start their own fires. There‘s only one episode that shows a kid striking a match—1992’s “The Tale of the Hungry Hounds.”

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